Sleaford Mods, English Tapas
★★★★☆
Download: Time Sands; Snout; Drayton Manored; Carlton Touts; Messy Anywhere
Since Sleaford Mods released Key Markets in 2015, things have changed radically, and arguably not for the better. Indeed, the general trajectory of creeping decline and bitterness makes Mods’ ranter Jason Williamson seem like some prescient social-analytic genius – so what does he foretell in English Tapas?
Well, it’s not good news. Of course. But it’s not as grim, viewed through his eyes, as it might seem: these dozen visceral tableaux of modern life are shot through with flashes of gallows humour and offhand absurdity that tempers the overall vision of a “newborn hell” peopled by “dumb Brits, lobbing down onepint cans of imported shit”, desperately trying to escape a future memorably described as “a flag pissed on and a king-size bag of quavers”.
The album takes its title from a pub chalkboard menu spotted by Williamson’s beat-sculpting partner Andrew Fearn, a finger-food feast comprising half a scotch egg, a cup of chips, pickle and a mini pork pie – a ludicrous conceit whose essential ambivalence (you don’t know whether the humour is accidental, or a deliberate self-pisstake) is mirrored in Sleaford Mods’ descriptions of modern life.
Not that Williamson ever lets the comedy sweeten the pill: if anything, the humour just lubricates the blade to help it slide in deeper. For the country depicted in English Tapas is a blasted wasteland peopled with demoralised, demonic victims, like something out of Bosch or Brueghel. “This is our tree, but there’s no chance of us reaching the top,” he notes in “Cuddly”, while life here is vividly described in “Time Sands” by the image of an hourglass, sand slipping slowly from one sphere to the other, only to be turned upside down again – a long, pointless, futile process, just mere existence without the glimmer of meaningful achievement.
So futile, in fact, that many seek change in any form, even the dubious pleasantries of little Englanders “rubbing up to the crown and the flag and the notion of who we are”, as Williamson notes in “Snout”, adding a terse “Fuck off!” as the full stop. It won’t end happily, he surmises in “B.H.S.”: “We’re going down like BHS/While the able-bodied vultures monitor and pick at us”. It’s a world view that makes you wonder: if you don’t like Brexit Britain, where can you go?
Not that it’s any better elsewhere. Humanity as a whole, he muses glumly in “Drayton Manored”, is not a collective but a collection of divergent trajectories, “adjacent lines like a tube map or whatever, a mass of lines that occasionally cross each other but never say anything, ever ever ever ever”. Can he be right again?